Accept

The most important basic rule of improvisation is: accept the offers of your scene partners. Whatever a player says, does, or implies on stage becomes the truth of the piece. The other players pick it up, build on it and carry it further. The one who accepts gives the scene a common ground; the one who refuses takes that ground away. As a result: refusing automatically stops any improvisation, or seriously disrupts and hinders it.

A simple example: Player A says to player B "Where are the pills?". B now has to engage with the pills, think about them, find them, hide them, refuse them, whatever fits. What B must not do is pretend they do not exist: "What pills? There are none!" That would be classic blocking and the scene runs into a wall.

"Yes, and ..." - the core principle

In the English-speaking tradition this rule is taught as "Yes, and ...", a term shaped above all by Keith Johnstone and later by the Chicago school around Del Close. See also Keith Johnstone and Del Close.

The "Yes" means: I accept the reality my scene partner has just established, without questioning it.

The "and" means: I add something of my own and move the scene one step further.

Both halves matter equally. A pure "Yes" without building on it leaves the scene to stagnate; in English this is called wimping, a soft acceptance that fails to act. An "And" without a preceding "Yes" ignores what the partner has built and feels like a monologue to the audience.

What can be accepted

An offer is any action or utterance by a player that relates to a scene partner. Offers come in many forms, and you want to accept all of them:

• Verbal offers, a statement about place, time, relationship, profession, marital status, feeling. "Grandpa, you really should not be driving anymore!" establishes kinship, age, driving and worry in a single sentence.
• Physical offers, a gesture, a posture, a handling action. If your partner mimes pressing a door handle, the room behind it is real.
• Spatial offers, everything that has been established by mime or word. If the table is on the left, it stays on the left.
• Emotional offers, a specific mood or feeling that your partner radiates. A player who cries into a scene is offering grief; you accept it by taking the grief seriously, not by trying to laugh it away.
• Relationship offers, "darling", "boss", "little brother", can create a relationship in seconds.
• Genre offers, tone of voice, word choice or body language hint at a genre (crime, soap opera, western). Accepting here means playing along in the same genre.
• Status offers, one player plays low, the other high. Accepting also means respecting and playing into the status gap, instead of immediately reversing it.

The key rule behind all of this is: take what is there. Often you must realise your partner's idea and set your own aside, instead of consistently trying to push your own agenda through.

Why accepting is the most important rule

Improvisation only works when everyone involved bases the action on a shared fact. If a scene had no binding "this is how it is now", every detail would have to be renegotiated from scratch and the result would not be a scene but a discussion. Accepting creates this shared foundation.

At the same time accepting is an act of trust. Whoever accepts what their partner offers signals: I heard you, I treat this as valid, I carry it with you. This signal is the basic currency of an improvising ensemble. Groups that consistently accept play more boldly, because nobody has to fear being left alone or corrected.

For the audience finally, accepting is the precondition for a recognisable story to emerge. Only established base information, CBZO or CROW, creates a world in which conflicts matter and resolutions are worth something.

Accepting is not the same as agreeing

Accepting does not mean that the character has to agree with the statement. A character may quarrel, contradict, scold, as long as the player accepts the fact behind the offer.

A: "You cheated on me!"

B (accepting, but in conflict): "Yes, and I do not even feel sorry."

Both players jointly carry the claim "B cheated on A". B's character behaves with hostility, but the offer is accepted. The scene now has a conflict, a direction, a dramaturgy.

This is a common misunderstanding among beginners: they confuse accepting with agreeing and refuse in order to create conflict. In truth, the strongest conflict always grows out of an accepted offer, because the characters share a common truth they can fight over.

Distinctions: blocking, soft refusal, steamrolling

The opposite of accepting is blocking, the direct rejection of an offer. But there are also subtler forms of refusal that are perhaps even more common:

• Soft refusal / waffling: the player formally says "yes" but immediately changes the offer. "Yes, pills, but actually they are sweets." The offer is qualified until nothing of it remains.
• Ignoring: the offer is not blocked but simply not picked up. The partner talks about something else, the offered information is lost.
• Steamrolling: the player does accept, but immediately pushes their own strong idea on top. The offer is overlaid instead of developed.

The same attitude helps against all of them: listen, perceive, first confirm, then build further.

Overaccepting

A particularly lovely variant is so-called overaccepting: you not only accept the offer, you inflate it and treat it as more important than it was meant. If your partner says "You have a little scratch", you do not reply "Yes, true", but "Oh my god, I am going to die!" Overaccepting heightens the emotional energy of the scene and turns small offers into big ones. See also yes exactly, and then ....

When accepting is difficult

Accepting is simple to describe and hard to practice. Typical pitfalls:

• Your own agenda: you have an idea in your head before the scene begins and defend it against every offer.
• Fear of consequence: you are afraid of the implications of an offer (death, sex, illness, strong emotion) and dodge it.
• Control impulse: you try to steer the scene towards something "good" instead of engaging with what is already there.
• Overhearing: you are too busy with your own next line to really hear what your partner just said.

The best counter-measure is active listening: put your attention on your partner, react only once the offer is clear, and then build, if possible, on the very last thing that was said.

Exercises for accepting

• Yes exactly, and then ..., every sentence starts with this formula, so the players inevitably build on each other.
• No-No games, in a full scene every form of "no", "not" or "but" is forbidden. You quickly notice how often you refuse by reflex.
• One-word stories, a sentence is built one word at a time, in a circle. Each person has to accept the beginning of the sentence and carry it on.
• Giving and receiving, mimed gifts are exchanged; the recipient names what they got and thanks specifically. Trains accepting non-verbal offers.

See also: Blocking, Offer, Establishing, Status, Be positive, Conflict, Stringency, Yes exactly, and then ...